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The Surgical Modeling research project is associated with the Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology Engineering Research Center (CISST-ERC) at Johns Hopkins University.We are interested in modeling and understanding the underlying structures in surgical motions. We would like to eventually use this understanding to create benchmarks for surgical skill evaluation, to develop methods for better surgical training and to automate the documentation of surgeries for libraries. Members of this project are from various other labs, including the Computational Interaction and Robotics Lab (CIRL), Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP), Haptics Exploration Lab (HEL) and also the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (JHMI).

INTRODUCTION - Surgical training and evaluation has traditionally been an interactive and slow process in which interns and junior residents perform operations under the supervision of a faculty surgeon. This method of training lacks any objective means of quantifying and assessing surgical skills. Economic pressures to reduce the cost of training surgeons and national limitations on resident work hours have created a need for efficient methods to supplement traditional training paradigms. While surgical simulators aim to provide such training, they have limited impact as a training tool since they are generally operation specific and cannot be broadly applied. Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgical systems, such as Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci, introduce new challenges to this paradigm due to its steep learning curve. However, their ability to record quantitative motion and video data opens up the possibility of creating descriptive, mathematical models to recognize and analyze surgical training and performance. These models can then be used to help evaluate and train surgeons, produce quantitative measures of surgical proficiency, automatically annotate surgical recordings, and provide data for a variety of other applications in medical informatics.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT - This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0534359."
"Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation."

Last updated: January 15, 2007

Recent News:

September 2006 - Our journal article "Towards Automatic Skill Evaluation: Detection and Segmentation of Robot-Assisted Surgical Motions." has been published in the September 2006 issue of Computer Aided Surgery.

March 15 - Henry has won the Link Foundation Advanced Simulation and Training Fellowship! Thank you to the Link Foundation and the Institute for Simulation & Training at the University of Central Florida. The fellowship is for the 2006-07 academic year. Henry will be continuing his research on surgical modeling. Congratulations Henry!

January 27 - Henry gives an invited talk at the medical informatics group at UCLA. His talk was titled Surgical Modeling as a Precursor to Skill Evaluation and Training.

January 24-27 - Henry and Dr. Hager attended the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (MMVR) conference in Long Beach, CA. Henry presented the work on surgical modeling and Dr Hager presented the poster on HMCS.

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